this time it's personal

Archive for August, 2013

The raspberries are in at the farm and they are super delicious, maybe more than any year previous. But this is exactly how I feel about the raspberries each year. Certainly this is the best they have ever tasted.

The town is emptied out because it is August. The students aren’t back yet and everyone and her brother is on the Cape or in Rhode Island. The sun and the air are perfect, especially at the farm.

I like to pick the tarragon in the herb garden. I don’t think anyone but me uses it. I think I single-handedly keep it robust, for you see, when you pick tarragon, it causes it to keep growing. Brookfield Farm tarragon the best tarragon I’ve ever eaten. It will not grow for me at home, neither in my garden nor in a pot.

One year I could not stop eating tarragon. I would pick it and eat it, lots of it. I think it affected my health. I didn’t grow an extra limb or anything, I just suspect it was acting on my hormones, something deep inside of me, bad. It made me a little crazy, I wanted to eat it at all hours.

I like the way tarragon makes my mouth kind of numb. I am experiencing a resurgence in my craving for it, only this year I have been eating it and then picking raspberries and popping them in my mouth. It is a taste sensation, I tell you, and I won’t be surprised when raspberry-tarragon desserts start showing up in fancy-pants restaurants from coast to coast.

When I eat the tarragon and pick the raspberries, I feel sinful, like I’ve gotten away with the Devil. The raspberries are in the accessible garden, directly across from the tarragon, so they are not for the regular farm share. That raspberry patch is way in the back of one of the main fields and not yet part of our share. I only eat a dozen or so of the raspberries at at time from the accessible garden and sometimes I think the sin is that there are so many overripe raspberries because no one is eating them at all.

I’ll be a featured reader next month at Unbuttoned, Thursday, September 12, 7-8:30 pm. There are usually 6 open mic slots followed by one or two featured readers. I know I’ll be reading alongside another poet.